Can 410 links trigger a penalty?

[Blink-SEO]

Hi! This is a follow on question from my other post - http://moz.com/community/q/site-dropped-after-recovery.

As mentioned there, I've ad a manual penalty revoked for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com/. This came after the forum was hacked and some poor quality SEO was done. We've managed to clean a large amount of links, but ones such as http://about1.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/tweetdeck-to-launch-as-html5-web-app-now-accepting-beta-testers.html (anchor is "microsoft") are still being found and indexed.

My question is that although the forum is now 410'd, can these junk links still be causing any harm? A huge amount have been disavowed, and many others taken down after a manual outreach campaign, but still others are appearing. The site is performing poorly in search despite having a much better domain authority, driven by largely great links from national newspapers, than its competitors, as well as solid user metrics such as a bounce rate of 30% and few on-site issues. This makes me think it must be the link profile.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

S

[RyanPurkey]

When disavowing links, you can also disavow by domain, like: about1.typepad.com... This can help speed up the process in some cases.

The work you've done currently seems in order. 410 is fine to use per Cutts himself: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2340728/matt-cutts-on-how-google-handles-404-410-status-codes.

Has the press come before or after the problem with the spam?  It'd be nice to get a similar amount of press as link recency plays a part too.

[Blink-SEO]

Thanks Ryan! The press has come in before and after the spam, they have a great PR who's got brilliant coverage.

[RyanPurkey]

Great. Also remember that the disavow tool only uses the latest list you send in, "Note: Uploading a new file will replace all previously uploaded ones." from: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487, so make sure that the list you send in last is the most complete list you have.

In general, I try to get a site's referral traffic up if it's not a healthy percentage of their site's visits, so if the PR company is providing that as well via their placements then they're really doing well.  Cheers!